Indonesia

Dessy Tri Anandani Bambang or Dessy TAB (b. 1984) is an Indonesian animator born in Brest, France. She started her carreer as animator by participating in animation challenges during her college days at Bandung Institute of Technology. She has won national awards mostly for her short animations and public social advertisements. In 2014, Dessy received an honorable mention award from ASEAN Animation Festival as a representative participant from Indonesia, for her animation Kopas The Thief. She was also selected as one of three animators for “Animation 3”, an animation masterclass, held collaboratively by Goethe Institut Indonesien, Institut Français Indonesie, and SAE Institut Jakarta. Her animated work, Pulang ke Indonesia, was the result of the masterclass and was completed in July 2016.

I am actually feeling insecure about being away from home but I know I can’t be and I don’t want to stay at home for the rest of my life. So I am planning to make an animation about the insecurity of leaving home, in a place far away from home. I’ve been wanting to make an animation that combines my doll-making skill. Amigurumi is a kind of crocheted doll; aside from being an animator, I am an amigurumi designer and have written a book about them. While I didn’t make any amigurumi for my previous animated works, I’ve made a fabric puppet to use for stop motion animation during my residency in Rimbun Dahan. I still don’t know whether it will work or not, or whether I will go back to paper and ink or digital animation. As I was making the preparation for the project, I realized that making animation in a new place will be very challenging especially from the technical aspect, but when there is a challenge, then there will be a solution. I am looking forward to see what kind of animation I will make in Rimbun Dahan.

Originally from Brazil, in the last three years Carlos Carvalho has been living in Asia, first India, now in Indonesia. Using crafts techniques and everyday materials, like textiles (mostly felt), paper, cardboard and paint, he builds topographies. Those topographies are found through the combination and juxtaposition of shapes cast from his body. His process is time consuming and repetitive, almost meditative.

My body is the center of my work, my body is queer and I’m gay. Thinking queerness in places where it’s not welcome or allowed is what is going through my mind. Especially because Brazil is also facing a conservative wave right now that is pressing against women, LGBTIs and the African-Brazilian population.

At Rimbun Dahan, being in the middle of all this green I wonder about things that hide in the vegetation, in the bushes. Being mostly by myself, this also brings about the idea that things that we fear hide in the dark, among the plants. I decided to play with the idea of camouflage as a starting point, as we can think of animals that hide. I mock the hunter animal print over the casts taken from my own body – I fear they are part of each of us, that they are constituents of our minds. This is supposed to be a turning point of the dynamics of fear. The body parts originating from the queer-gay body to become the element that hides and hunts, I put the body in a position of power and control, which is what the queer body needs to have in today’s reality.

Citra Pratiwi (b. 1981 in Pati, Indonesia) works intensely between body, story, movement and expression — presented in her works in dance and theater. She’s a founder of Migrating Troop Performing Art Network, a hub for artists who want to work in multi and interdisciplinary art to refresh their work and expression. Citra is a graduate of Ethnomusicology from Indonesia Institute of Art Yogyakarta, and was one of the awarded artists for Empowering Women Artists by Kelola Foundation. She is an art-activist, engaging her work to speak about women’s issues, especially women’s issues in Indonesia and she’s also worked as a curator at Padepokan Seni Bagong Kussudiardja, a private cultural centre in Yogyakarta.

During her one month residency at Rimbun Dahan, Citra will be developing her new project named Finding Stillness. It will be a research project exploring body memory, conscious and unconscious body, using Jathilan or Kuda Kepang folk dance as entry material.

I want to research what is stillness in the unconscious and bring this concept into contemporary dance work.

Kelvin Atmadibrata (b.1988, Jakarta, Indonesia) recruits superpowers awakened by puberty and adolescent fantasy to assemble formidable armies of outlaws. Equipped by shōnen characters and macho ero-kawaii, his antiheroes contest the masculine and erotic in Southeast Asia. He works primarily through performances, often accompanied by and translated into drawings, mixed media collages and objects compiled as installations.

Growing Up, installation and performance, 2014

Love Forever, photography (diptych), 2014

If you had been here, he wouldn’t have died, performance, 2015

A New Dawn Has Come, kinetic installation and performance, 2016

Always be with you (study of Fueki), collage, 2016

存在の耐えられない透明さ, installation and performance, 2016

During his residency in Rimbun Dahan, he plans to expand a narrative that is triggered by a Malayan historical figure, Laksamana Cheng Ho. He seeks to learn the Admiral’s influence in today’s society, in particular in regards to his masculine identity and how it has potentially structured the perception of power, race and religion in modern politics. This will also be motivated by cultural findings during his stay in Malaysia, discussions and exchanges with locals as well as his constant interest in virtual RPG elements.

The resulting project is described and photographed below (performance photos by Nazir Azhari). Kelvin updated his progress in weekly blog-like entries on his website.

Tidal Bulge is the rise and fall of masculinity caused by the combined effects of gravitational forces exerted by one’s racial and economic status and the self conflicts.

Initiated by the interest towards Laksamana Cheng Ho’s treasure fleet, the project navigates around Malaysian Chinese masculine identities by figuring various struggles faced. Approached through RPG game theories, the visual aspects of the works are designed to be decided by the participants in forms of paper collages and their performed elements.

The participants are imagined as crews or sailors of a treasure fleet in voyage. Sea travels utilize lunar navigation as compass which also becomes the underlying historical prescriptions of the Chinese ethnicity throughout Malaya Peninsula. Apart from that, other game characters-based visual decisions are motivated by Malaysian cultural elements that suggest close proximity and relevance to astrology and the science of gravity. Within social context, this participatory work is a plea towards racial and ethnic representation, their potential of indigeneity as well as its masculine connotation within Malaysia.

Irwan was born and lives in Serang, Baten in Indonesia. His works have appeared in a few poetry anthologies, such as Dari Batas Waktu ke Perjalanan Kamar sampai Kabar dari Langit (2006), Candu Rindu (2009), Akulah Musi (2011), Narasi Tembuni (2012) and have also appeared in other mass media.

His day job is as a teacher of Indonesian language and literature SMP PGRI 2 Kota Serang, and he is also active in Kubah Budaya (Community to Change Culture) – a cultural and literary community founded by himself, colleague and friend Wan Anwar, and a few other peers. Irwan was entrusted with the heading Kubah Budaya from 2006 to 2009. Engaging and conversing with the community increased and deepened his love for literature and involvement with poetry. Poetry to him became like a magnet for his deep interest in writing every day; he has also written a few essays about the world of literature and education.

To him, writing poetry is to record life, a way to preserve as well as unite knowledge, experience, and thought to then be released into the flow and waves of each person’s life. During his residency at Rimbun Dahan, he hopes to discover new knowledge and experiences to be formed into works that contain different patterns to works he has written before.

Currently, Irwan is working on writing poems for his first poetry collection. Being a teacher and a poet was something he never even dreamed of, but he is grateful now for the opportunity to be both. He believes in what Herman FR (poet, teacher, and friend) once wrote, “A good poet is a poet that is a mannered poet. A mannered poet is a humble poet. A mannered and humble poet has a high likelihood of becoming a poet of deep belief and piety, escaping the punishments of God – because poets, according to God, are those who like to explore the wilderness of fantasy and the imagination. Therefore to be both a poet and a teacher is a pleasure to be appreciated.”

Doni Maulistya (b. 1987 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia) is an artist with an educational background in photography. He studied documentary photography through workshops such as Angkor Photography Workshop in Siem Reap, Cambodia (2009) and Foundry Photo Workshop in Istanbul, Turkey (2010). He’s also made works using installation and film.

As I live my life as an artist, I started to question my position in a society that is continuously in a dynamic negotiation between ‘the old’ and ‘the new’. I see the negotiation as an identity formation process that will always happen in human history. Thus, in making artworks, I am always interested in exploring the themes of history, tradition, and other dialectic dimensions that happens within society, an intermingling of culture.

Through my artistic research, I realize that no one medium should be considered a sole artistic language that can convey messages. Therefore, I expand my exploration on photography as well as on other media beyond photography.

Within the past four years, my artistic exploration has mostly been of the elements of performing and motion. My interests in that exploration started when I worked on performing art projects with Papermoon Puppet Theatre and Migrating Troop Theatre. Those events have enriched my experience to develop my body of work. One of the biggest challenges I have gone through is how to make objects that can cover all the different elements in performing art, such as movement, sound, interactivity, storytelling, etc. Afterwards, I decided to explore kinetic, video, sound, installation, and any other medium that I can learn about and apply to my artistic works. Besides learning the intermingled elements of any medium I use, I also always aim to learn how to discuss the local aspects in global context.

During the residency at Rimbun Dahan I hope to work on developing my current project called Still Praying. This project is about exploring the ‘Believing Practice’ that happens in contemporary society. But still, I always keep a vacant room on every project to allow new ideas to further develop.

Ibed Surgana Yuga was born in a traditional Balinese farming family, 14 August 1983. He has been living in Yogyakarta, Java since 2003 to complete his theatre direction study in the Theatre Department of the Indonesia Arts Institute of Yogyakarta.

In 2012, Ibed initiated the Kalanari Theatre Movement, an institution which conducts cultural movements through theatre works. The objective of Kalanari is to reaffirm the bond between performance and society, and to inspire people to develop their cultures. In Kalanari, Ibed has framed his works through the concept of engaging intimately with space with ‘space’ understood both in a broader social and cultural context and more narrowly as the physical (natural and architectural) space of performance. His theatre works are site-specific so as to give highest value to improvisation.

He’s applied this concept by working with groups such as villagers, labourers, traditional art communities, domestic workers, interdisciplinary artists, etc. Ibed has worked in and around Indonesia, in historical, natural and architectural sites. He has also worked internationally, in Japan, Singapore and Ireland. He’s given meaning to his works as not just a collaborative artistic work, but a cultural dialogue. According to Ibed, theatre is neither for the creation of only performances or artistic works; it has a noble vision and mission to develop society’s cultures by emphasizing values of humanity.

During his short residency at Rimbun Dahan, Ibed wants to create a theatrical work based on ideas of engaging intimately with the natural, architectural and textual (story, history, myth, etc.) aspect of the site. He aims to choose a site in Rimbun Dahan by digging into the many textual aspects of the site, which will then be interpreted to create a site specific performance which is blended with his cultural background. He hopes to collaborate in this endeavour with local artists in any disciplines.

Khairani Barokka (b. 1985) is a writer, poet, and interdisciplinary artist. She is also a practitioner of think/do advocacy in the arts, particularly on the ways in which new media can increase inclusion and access for and by disability cultures and feminisms (both of which she is happy to be a part of). Born in Jakarta, Okka works, teaches, and is published internationally, with art, literature, disability culture and transdisciplinary performances and workshops held across India, the US, Australia, Malaysia, the UK, Austria, Singapore, and her native Indonesia. She has a masters from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, as a Tisch Departmental Fellow, and among her awards and honors was Emerging Writers Festival’s (AUS) Inaugural International Writer-In-Residence for 2013. Okka is the writer, performer, and producer of a (hearing-impaired accessible) solo poetry/performance art show, “Eve and Mary Are Having Coffee”, which premiered at Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2014.

Okka is delighted to be part of the Rimbun Dahan community for 6 months, where she is working on writing projects as well as using text in mixed media works.

Agustian Supriatna (b. 1981 in Lampung, Sumatra, Indonesia) , an abstract painter with unique compositions. A combination of soft and bright colors, wild lines and brush strokes that create harmony, gives the audience an opportunity to freely explore his paintings. He also creates sculptures out of found metal objects.

Indonesia’s famous abstract painter Affandi the Maestro inspired him to be an artist. He studied with Indonesian elder painters, one of them being Roedyat Martadirejda who gave him the task of sketching every day for the rest of his life.

Agustian currently resides in Bali, having moved there in 1999. His paintings and sculptures have been exhibited internationally and his recent solo exhibition at Art Expo Malaysia 2012 was sold out. He is represented in the following countries all over the world; America, Australia, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Holland, Hong Kong, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Thailand. He undertook a three-month residency in 2013 at Hotel Penaga.